Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch

Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch: a Welsh town with one of the longest names in the world, AND quite possibly the longest URL on the web? (and yes, I copied and pasted that)

Answers.com tells us that:

A translation into English would yield "St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool and the church of St Tysilio of the red cave".

[The name] was artificially contrived in the 1860s to bestow upon the [train] station the honour of having the longest name of any railway station in the United Kingdom: an early example of a publicity stunt.

If you must know, the pronunciation is here.

Oh, and I discovered it's NOT the longest valid URL on the web: http://www.abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyzabcdefghijk.com/ is (where you can sign up for a free email address at that domain...hmmmm). Apparently you can have a maximum of 63 characters in the domain name. So they stress that this is only the longest "alphabetical" domain name because it would actually tie with any other 63-character domain names. Whereas the welsh town site has only 58 letters. Or 51 in Welsh.

I may have first read of this town at Joel's blog. I think I saw it somewhere else as well, but I can't remember where.